I have a new PC with a MSI K7T266 Pro mainboard, an Athlon XP 1600+, and Windows XP Home. Trying to boot BeOS 5PE, I just get "too many disk errors" on the Dos screen. Some say this is the Athlon and some say its WinXP but no-one knows what to do. Any help would be great, thanks.

You're using DOS?

First of all, the "too many disk errors" message normally occurs when you are using a defective BeOS boot disk, ie. a floppy disk with surface errors.
But it also might just be that BeOS doesn't like your WinXP partition.
The bootloader won't find the image.be file on a WinXP NTFS partition, since the NTFS format seems to have been changed by Microsoft. Try a FAT32 partition instead.

Secondly, BeOS doesn't really support the Athlon XP (due it's SSE instructions it seems to think that it's a P3, but the Athlon isn't 100% P3 compatible, which leads to a crash), thus has to be patched. Sorry, don't have the URL of the patch handy at the moment, but you might find it in the BeGroovy.com forum.
An alternative solution might be to disable the SSE instructions in the BIOS.

Thanks for your response MIKe. I thought the first disk I made was bad and went through a new pack of 10. Same problem. I did a clean install of WinXP and that cleared it up. I did have a lot of auto-utilities running like Windows Washer, I dunno. Now I get the boot screen reboot problem, which I already read was the AthlonXP. There's no bios update for turning off SSE listed on MSI's site. I'm going to call them tommorrow...

MSI SUCKS! They told me they would never have an interest in doing anything like that (updating their BIOS to turn of SSE) for just one application, no matter how many people wanted it, and that I should "...just be happy with Windows". Looks like I'm looking at Mandrake Linux for now and hoping like mad that BlueOS becomes a reality, or that Palm sees the light.

I have BeOS, Win XP, and a P3, and BeOS runs fine. There are no conflicts. Maybe you should just install a new motherboard, and forget about the Athlon XP. Good luck, and have fun!

-TheIce2

O.K. I've heard too many complaints about Athlon. I have an Athlon 1.2 T-Bird, WindowsXP and BeOS. All run fine. Only problem I have ever had was when I tried to put on Linux as my third OS. I could have accomplished that also, but didn't realize there was an Athlon version of Mandrake and I don't have the correct version. By the way, allow BeOs Pro to think your XP is WinNT. This forces an image file to be written to your floppy. Insert floppy, allow boot. Type "createbe" and follow instructions. Also make and use a boot disk for the BeOS to start. Good Luck.

hey, what's the problem, with your athlon xp.

just go to

http://www.reveng.cjb.net/tools.php4
and install the patch. it works really fine on my xp!

so, just download it and ready. :)

to be or not to be...
SamUel -> tHe LighTKnighT